Leo Leonard at his Griffintown stable on Ottawa St., with horse Rocky in the background. “People say I should turn the place into a zoo and charge admission,” he says.
During the Second World War you could hire a calèche to take you up to Mount Royal for $5. Today, if you can find a driver willing to make the four-hour return trip to the mountain, it would cost about $300.
“When I began driving in 1942, it was another era,” said Leo Leonard. He has owned the Griffintown Horse Palace on Ottawa St. for 40 years.
“Back then there were 62 carriages at Dominion Square outside the Windsor Hotel and another 25 outside the gates of McGill. Today, there are only 35 calèche drivers’ permits, and all the drivers are down in Old Montreal.”
The price of a calèche ride is $45 for a half-hour, $80 for an hour. Competition is stiff.
Horse-drawn carriages are an anachronism in the 21st century, and their future, as well as that of Leonard’s stables just south of the École de technologie supérieure on Notre Dame St. W., is up in the air.
The Southwest borough has designs on Leonard’s property, one of the last in the area to house horses.
A redevelopment plan unveiled in October for the neighbourhood has the stables, tack house and corral earmarked as an area for office and commercial space, and affordable and subsidized housing.
Inspired by Toronto’s Distillery district, an industrial area that was transformed into a gentrified neighbourhood, urban planners see Griffintown as an ideal site for redevelopment.
Heritage Montreal’s Dinu Bumbaru says while he wel- comes development in the area, razing the stables would be a mistake.
“They are not a great monument,” he said, “but they are the only remnants to remind us that the driving force behind the metropolis was the horse.
“There is room in the city’s heritage policy to keep Leonard’s stables, and perhaps integrate them into a … network of Montreal memory to remind us it is the unheralded blue-collar workers who make a great city.”
Leonard was born in Goose Village and raised in Griffintown. He is 81.
Known as Clawhammer Jack, he is probably one of the last residents to have lived and worked in the neighbourhood for eight decades.
His permit to run his stable has a grandfather clause that states he can keep horses on the property as long as he owns it.
Leonard concedes, however, developers are eager to acquire his land, and perhaps the time has come for him to sell.
“I’ve always been in the horse business, but now I’m fed up with the industry,” Leonard said.
“People say I should turn the place into a zoo and charge admission,” he said with a chuckle.
Leonard bought the stables, which date from 1862, for $15,000 in 1967 when the city ran the Ville Marie Expressway eight blocks to the east, and people moved out of the neighbourhood.
He won’t say how much he wants for the property, which contains residential units, a tack house, a barn for eight horses and a small exercise corral.
“I’m not supposed to talk about anything, but, yes, agents have been coming around to talk to me about selling. We’ll see what happens,” Leonard said.
In addition to his property, he says, real estate agents are looking at a nearby scrapyard and an old paint shop next door.
Should he sell, Leonard isn’t sure what he’ll do if he no longer has horses to look after.
“I won’t go live in Florida, that’s for sure,” he said. “You’ll never catch me on a plane.”
